Michael Field available for preorders!

One of the foundational motivations for the editorial project at Golias was to help revive great works of poetry whose contemporary value and relevance is too often limited to academic audiences, and we are truly excited to announce the first publication in our line of archival reissues:

Composed over a century ago, the poetic worlds of Michael Field are as surprising, immersive, and breathtaking today as when they were written—as inventive as they are formally rigorous as they are deeply felt and lived. After more than a year of editorial preparation we are thrilled to finally be sharing this work, and we are also excited that the inimitable poet Stacy Szymaszek, former director of the Poetry Project, has contributed a lucid and inviting foreword to help ground the volume in our contemporary moment.

"Michael Field" was the shared pseudonym of Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who lived together as lovers and collaboratively wrote some eight volumes of poetry and twenty-seven plays and whose poetry enjoyed both popular and critical success until their friend, the poet Robert Browning, let slip Field's true identity. While their early poetry displays strong aestheticist currents both formally and thematically, their later poems turn toward Symbolism and Catholic spirituality without ever straying from an idiosyncratic style that is somehow at once extravagantly precise and profoundly sensuous. The selection of poems in Precious against a Precious Thing spans their thirty-year collaboration and a wide range of formal gambits and registers, from erotic reconstructions of Sapphic verse fragments and ekphrastic reveries over Grand Tour oil paintings to theologically freighted odes, sonnets of rural retirement, and elegies to their beloved pet Chow Chow.

In her foreword, poet Stacy Szymaszek writes, “Field’s work is organized around body logic—experience, making a spectacle of one’s own life, beauty and giving pleasure. In the grips of our current political disaster, it may not carry a lot of weight to think one’s work is important for such things. Yet work that excites my mind-body helps remind me that I am an erotic being. When I proceed through life as my best erotic self, I am harder for the law to control. When I am harder for the law to control, i.e., making a spectacle of myself, others can see me. There is always the hope that Emily Dickinson expressed: ‘Are you nobody too?’ I step out of convention for community, and that action is the enemy of fascism.”

Please stay tuned, also, for some Winter 2019 events in both New York and North Carolina to celebrate the work and legacy of Michael Field.

Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, arts administrator, and teacher. She is the author of Emptied of All Ships, Hyperglossia (both from Litmus Press), A Year from Today, hart island (both from Nightboat Books), and Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (Fence Books), which won the Ottoline Prize and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In 2014 she received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Szymaszek is a regular teacher at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, a mentor for Queer Art Mentorship, and the 2018 Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. She was the executive director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church from 2007–2018.